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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  San Francisco: The twice-cooked immigrant
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San Francisco: The twice-cooked immigrant

Leaving the City by the Bay’s organic arugula soy latte prettiness, but keeping a gym membership to stay tethered to it

One of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars. Photographs: iStockphoto (iStockphoto)Premium
One of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars. Photographs: iStockphoto (iStockphoto)

I have no idea when San Francisco became home.

It probably began the day I finally invested in my first real piece of furniture—a second-hand wooden almirah whose door refused to shut properly. Until then I had lived out of suitcases and could pack my entire life into my Honda hatchback—and I was proud of it. “You always have one foot out of the door, ready to bolt," an American friend would complain ruefully. But the swirling San Francisco fog that snuck up quietly on late summer afternoons somehow got under my skin. One day I signed the papers for a house. Then a golden-eyed black cat showed up. Finally a shivering snaggle-toothed runaway chihuahua came on board and I was well and truly leashed to the city.

It was an easy city to be attached to, pocket-sized, 7x7 sq. miles and beautiful in a way cities have no right to be. When you drove up a crazily steep hill, the wheels of your car barely clinging to the road, certain your brakes would fail at the STOP sign, and abruptly the city just fell away, hurtling down the hillside all the way to the aquamarine waters of the Bay, you caught your breath every time. When the bars emptied out at night and you could smell a carnitas quesadilla sizzling fatly in a taqueria in the Mission, while the jukebox blared Latin rock, everything felt right in the world. And when you laid out your picnic in Mission Dolores Park while the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, bearded men in nun drag complete with wimples and kabuki make-up, showed up for the annual Easter Sunday Hunky Jesus contest, you wondered how you would ever explain your life to anyone back home in Kolkata. I still called Kolkata home then, the city I grew up in. Perhaps it was out of habit or perhaps it was just loyalty.

A view of the city from the Twin Peaks
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A view of the city from the Twin Peaks

Yet I left San Francisco. It had become too comfortable in its organic arugula soy latte prettiness. The Bay Area is like swimming in a warm pool, the writer Vikram Seth had once said. You keep doing laps until one day you get out of the pool, and 15 years have passed. So I left the dog, the cat, the little house with the pointed roof, the farmers’ market at the bottom of the hill where the Vietnamese women sold exotic greens I had never seen before. I left it all to come back to Kolkata. It’s not a big deal, I told friends with false bravado. I’ll always be at home in one Cal or another—Calcutta or California.

But when I go back to California now, across the never-ending Pacific Ocean, it’s a different sort of homecoming. How do you go home to a city where you have no home any more, where what was a home is now a 2BR-1BA house that strangers rent, yet the rosemary you planted in your backyard grows in uncaring abundance without you?

The city is the same, its landmarks unaltered. The lights still sparkle on the Twin Peaks or, as the Spanish called them much more evocatively, Los Pechos de la Chola (breasts of the Indian maiden). The ruins of the old Sutro Baths, once the largest indoor swimming pool in the world, are still crumbling slowly into the Pacific Ocean. The crookedest street in the world is still as crooked and filled with car-loads of tourists slowly winding their way down past neat flower beds. The Golden Gate Bridge is still not golden.

The Golden Gate Bridge
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The Golden Gate Bridge

But home was never about the tourist landmarks. It was about the Korean-run corner store where I went to get my 2% milk but which has now fallen victim to sky-rocketing rents and turned into a hipster café with designer coffee and free Wi-Fi. As a non-resident Indian, no homecoming to Kolkata was complete without a simple home-made goat curry and rice meal. And no return to San Francisco was complete without sushi–barbecued eel or spicy fatty tuna. But these days my friends have new favourite eateries. They are exciting and new, but I know this can only be an infatuation, a one-night stand. They cannot become my comfort food.

Once, San Francisco had seemed unchanging every time I returned to it after a trip to India, like a jacket always there to slip into. Perhaps it was the dizzying pace of change in India, the way it smacked you across the face with newly sprung malls, multiplexes and apartment complexes, that made me feel that life in San Francisco was trapped in a Neverland of red wine and artisanal cheese. But I was fooled by the timeless illusion of that fog, fooled into thinking yet again that life would wait for me. The city has moved on.

You have no choice about the city you are born in, but it’s a disquieting feeling to realize that a city you have given your heart to (and your heartbreak) can also slip away from you. Yet there is liberation in that too, to know that you can learn an old city in new ways, that when you come to what used to be your crossroads, you can take the other road, the one less taken.

And so I discover another San Francisco, not as a native or a tourist, but suspended somewhere in between. I marvel at how it’s so much more a Pacific city than an American one, connected to China and Japan and Thailand more than Chicago or Boston. I discover how much I missed public libraries. I go look at the bisons in Golden Gate Park in the middle of a weekday. I can finally try the famous chicken roasted in a brick oven at Zuni Café that takes a minimum of 45 minutes (or, as a friend puts it, “two margaritas and a plate of shoestring fries, that’s how long") because I have the time to indulge.

I notice too the growing homeless encampments and the eerily silent double-decker buses ferrying software engineers from Silicon Valley. I hear the heroin addicts rummaging in the trash cans at daybreak. And when I board a bus in San Francisco, I notice the African-American bus driver talking to the Chinese grandmother with her overflowing shopping bag, while a Latino teenager in a hoodie nods along to his headphones. All this was always there, but now I notice it because I am savouring the city, instead of just living in it. I am storing away memories to take back.

There are other things I take back now. I scour the supermarket for those tastes I miss in India—achiote chilli, pine nuts, miso. I will carry them back to India carefully the way I once brought paanch phoron and sandesh from India. I am a twice-cooked immigrant these days, recreating homes out of substitutes wherever I go, replacing one “nostalgist’s map" with another.

Sometimes it feels like having two homes, the best of both worlds. But sometimes at night in San Francisco, when I am jet-lagged and wired, acutely aware of the hushed silence of the streets outside, it feels like a kind of homelessness. I lie awake in my friend’s guest bedroom straining to hear the comforting clatter of the J-Church streetcar coming up the hill. Soon it will be daylight. Perhaps I can go to the gym, I think.

I still pay my gym membership every month. It was such a lifetime deal I cannot let go of it, I tell friends. But I know that the real reason is that it still tethers me to this city. The gym attendants have changed. The new ones don’t recognize me, but when I swipe my finger on the little scanner, they smile, hand me a towel and let me in unquestioningly, as if I had never left.

Sandip Roy is the author of the novel Don’t Let Him Know.

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Published: 22 Apr 2016, 12:08 PM IST
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